I've long had a seperate width problem, which i"ve sort of assumed were in my computer settings.
Even when there is no such post as sparky describes, there's ~a visible inch and a half more width than there is to my screen.

Is this "normal"?

The Lady with a Lamprey

"The powerful are exploiting people, art and ideas, and this leads to us plebes debating how to best ration ice.Man, no wonder they always win....." Lonesomebri

Long pages annoy me because I am stupid. I have my stuff set to display older first (just because that is the way I visualize things in my head, people are adding stuff after the previous person did things). That means my usualy MO is to click on the last page of a thread, use the mouse wheel to get all the way down to the end, then work my way back and any newer posts will come at the bottom. It just means I might have to scroll through a shipload of messages to get to the bottom of things.

Why not allow each user to set arbitrary preferences for page length and sort order (latest post first or last). Those preferences would be stored in a cookie (eplaya already uses cookies), and queried during page display. This ranks as a nice asthetic feature, but not functionally required.

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
-- George Washington

I agree that being able to choose would be great. Right now, though, we have the option to set it globally. Doing it otherwise is a SMOP and we have bigger fish to fry in terms of programming efforts. If you can locate a preexisting MOD that does this, please let me know and we will put in on the Long List Of Things People Want Me To Do.

Yes, an arbitrary page length and sort is an SMOP. If I can be of assistance with that, drop me a note.

To answer the question at hand, I think that the reason to limit page length is bandwidth. If one had infinite bandwidth (and memory) an infinite page length would be no problem. For those with DSL or broadband, a long page length is not a problem. But for our brethren on dial-up, a short page length is much better (and not much of a burden for those with high-speed connections). So in the interest of those with slow connections, I favor a short page length.

"Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

honestly, I think length would be sort of a non-issue if the system could recognize the last post read under a certain heading and take the user to one post later than that automatically when entering a thread.

you know, the more I stop in here, the more annoyed I am by the lengthy pages. Even 33 seems long, now. it would be different if there was a way to see the first UNREAD post or something, but to see post 32 (the ONLY new post on a given thread), I have to wade through all 31 prior posts on the page (AND wait for them all to load).